Search appliances typically crawl documents and periodically construct and reconstruct indices upon which user queries are performed. The documents crawled may be either public documents, or access controlled documents to which an administrator may wish to limit access to specific users or groups of users. The particular index that a user queries generally changes only periodically. Thus, a user query may be submitted against an index that is potentially days old. During the time interval between when an index is created and when it is replaced with an updated version, an administrator or other party may wish to change the security status of a document in the index from access controlled to public, or vice versa. There exists a need to be able to update the security status of a document between re-indexing periods.